Word: courtial
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...spate. Father is a clerk, a monster of suspicion and self-pity; Mother deals in junk, which she tries to sell as antiques. They are failures, and Ferdinand thrashes them frightfully for it. He throws himself on the mercies of an uncle, who is a friend of Courtial Des Pereires, a prince of crackpots...
...Courtial takes on Ferdinand as a "secretary" in a business that becomes the mecca for every meccano-minded nut in France. It is the world of popular mechanics fictionalized. Courtial himself is an idealist and charlatan, infatuated with the possibilities of lighter-than-air travel. For modest fees, he demonstrates balloon ascents to mobs of gawping yokels...
This comic picaresque stuff is so easy to read that the reader might fail to notice Céline's didactic intentions. Courtial is Yongkind, grown up and equipped with a degree from the polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological...
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